


your words in my memory, are like music to me

by acceptnosubstitutes



Category: Falling Skies
Genre: Gen, MAJOR spoilers up to 4x07, death and the afterlife, unmitigated angst
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-08-05
Updated: 2014-08-05
Packaged: 2018-02-11 20:36:10
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,590
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2082294
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/acceptnosubstitutes/pseuds/acceptnosubstitutes
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Lourdes can be content, she thinks, as Dai joins her side, as they both watch the people who’ve stolen their hearts, who’ve integrated them so tightly woven into their lives, that they just can’t let go.</p><p>Even in death.</p>
            </blockquote>





	your words in my memory, are like music to me

**Author's Note:**

> I really like how the language came out on this one. Almost poetic, at times.

“Relax,” Lexi says, false honey syrup over the shuttered, shielded look in her eyes.

She’s closed off. Shut down. Gone.

Lourdes doesn’t even recognize her, and that’s the last thought she has before the pain builds blinding. It’s like her head is an orange, Lexi’s voice a probing knife at the crown of her head, slowly peeling her like an onion.

This isn’t peace. This isn’t okay.

Lourdes struggles, her heart picking up in rapid tap-taps, like the fluttering of hummingbird wings.

She hears Pope. Can’t really see him, can’t understand what he’s saying, but it’s instinct, the urge to _live_ , that has her trying to reach out to him.

Maybe he even reaches back before Lexi swings him away.

This isn’t peace. This isn’t okay.

“Lexi, please,” she pleads, blinking against the feeling of wet, so much wet building up in her tear ducts.

It’s thicker than tears, thicker and stings, and it’s dripping out of her eyes now. And that’s not okay.

Lexi tilts her head, vivid green examining Lourdes like she’s a specimen under a microscope. She smiles.

In one moment Lourdes is pleading for her life, the next she’s screaming, surging up, trying to fight off whatever’s holding her back. She has to get away, can’t they see? 

She, her life, _their_ lives, the ones Lexi brought in with her message of peace, the ones who are lost without hope now, they’re important. They need to be protected.

She needs to get away from Lexi.

“Help me,” Lourdes sobs, still straining for freedom. Her nails scrip scrape against something rough, surrounding her, something she vaguely knows. 

Something she’s been missing for what seems like years. For what was.

She forces herself down, breathes out harsh, gasping breaths into a regular, quieter rhythm, all the while her hands are smoothing down, smoothing out, shaking over the denim clad arms clasped around her.

Firm and unbreakable. But gentle.

“Shh,” a voice soothes her.

Reminds her of rough whiskey, that she tried once in college, choked on and ended up spitting out.

But this, that voice, _his voice_ , is like silk. And where it wraps around her, she feels safe, tucked away under the strong arms she always figured would keep the demons out somehow.

It’s stupid. He still died. Where was God in that?

Still, Lourdes twists around and buries her face against the chest behind her, gives in, lets go, and cries.

Long, hard, for what seems like forever, and the only thing she’s aware of past her choppy, half broken gasping, is the hand smoothing down her hair, the quiet, whispered nonsense meant to soothe.

He always could calm her down, help her believe again, even if he never held her like this, even if she’s pretty sure he didn’t believe at all, while they were both still, still. She can’t finish her sentence.

Quiets.

Lourdes turns her face, just enough she can speak and it won’t get muffled.

“We’re dead, aren’t we.”

“‘Fraid so,” he tells her, squeezes her in a tight hug she wants to sink into, just for a moment.

Then he lets go of her, so she can pull back, sit up and rub her eyes dry on her sleeves. And it is him, it is Dai, who held her and wouldn’t let go even while Lexi pushed pushed _pushed_ her away.

He smiles at her, that rare, genuine smile that picks up at the left corner of his mouth and tends to slant lopsided, as she starts to cry again. 

Albeit silent tears now, and they dry almost instantly. And when they do, she can’t help but lean in, her shaking fingers coming up to the side of his face, which he allows.

She needs to make sure he’s _real_ , when Lexi.

Her reaction to the feel of warm, _warm_ skin under her fingers is embarrassingly less dramatic than her reaction to Lexi popping her brain like a grapefruit, but Lourdes figures she’s entitled to girlish giggling and the attack hug that follows.

She pulls back and giggles some more, thinks she sounds vaguely hysterical, but she can’t stop. 

This though, this is okay.

This is okay.

When she calms, Lourdes sits back against the cold ground, feeling the rough grain of old marble underneath the palms of her hands. She cranes her neck and looks up, and up, and up. Sees the delicate scroll work, patterned designs, the images on the walls she’s known all her life.

“Dai,” she asks, looking around in wonder, “are we in a church?”

He looks up too, when she glances at him, and then they spend a few minutes in silence. Peaceful, blessed, silence.

“Don’t you recognize it?”

She frowns, shaking her head. Not all of it.

“It’s yours,” he tells her, quiet, “well, your namesake, anyway.”

“Our Lady of Lourdes,” they both say, at the same time.

So, Lourdes. France. If France even exists here. Wherever they are.

This time, Lourdes doesn’t even mind the tears sliding down her cheeks. It feels cleansing. It feels like a sign.

That despite everything, despite the fact she turned her back, twice, in any number of small ways, she’s still _wanted_.

“But this isn’t what, what it looks like. Inside.”

Dai shrugs, as if asking her how he’s supposed to know what the interior of a Catholic church looks like.

Definitely not a Catholic then.

“It seems like,” he says, but hesitates, like this is something horrible.

Or too delicate for words from a man who has always struggled with them. But he pushes on.

“It seems like the location is a mix of what it is, where we aren’t, and. Of us. You recognize what isn’t supposed to be here?”

Lourdes takes another look, and there’s a soft gasp when she does. She does know where the irregularities come from and they’re from _home_. By the soft look Dai graces her with, he knows.

Something bothers her though.

“You said us?”

He nods, braces a hand against a church pew and stands up. Reaches out for her hand and she lets him lead her to the doors.

“You built the church here, Lourdes,” is all he says, before he opens the doors and Lourdes closes her eyes against a sudden blast of bright light.

It fades.

And she looks. And she can’t help the little, choked noise that bursts out from somewhere in the depths of her heart.

Because it’s 2nd Mass. 

The landscape is wrong, the grass a more vivid green than Lourdes has ever seen, building up and up in places like little plateaus, the little thatched roof houses sprawling out into the distance.

But then there’s Anne on the steps of the med bus, looking up at the sky.

Ben, Matt, and Hal chase a soccer ball around in circles, closely followed by Jimmy. And Rick.

Maggie, her head thrown back. Laughing. Lars at her side, smirking.

There’s Mike, and Dingann in a little hide away, pouring over a map on a table. Next to Dingaan, Lourdes sees Denny, arguing about jazz music, of all things, to a Dingaan who appears to be ignoring her.

Tom and Weaver, walking perimeter.

She sees Anthony, with his arm slung around Dick’s neck, his friend himself looking mildly alarmed, possibly at the way Kadar’s face is growing progressively more green the longer Anthony enthusiastically goes on.

There’s even Pope, Sarah, the Beserkers, off to the side shooting at empty beer cans on top of wooden posts staked into the ground. 

Karen. As she was, all spunk and fireballs, no strange, half malicious grins, hands on her hips as she surveys her broken down motorbike.

Jamil somewhere near her, sitting on the ground and messing around with some of the bike’s mechanical parts as if they fascinate him.

Maybe Lourdes even sees Marina, Bressler, the others at Charleston, the dead, the alive, the missing. 2nd Mass’ dead, alive, and missing before Lexi’s peace camp, before Charleston. 

Maybe even Cochise.

It’s populated with so many people, she can’t be sure. She can’t catalog them all.

And there’s, there’s, Lourdes feels the breath leave her chest in a painful way, like she’s taken a sledgehammer to her sternum.

Because there’s Lexi, _baby_ Lexi, just sitting there on a dead tree stump, kicking up her legs and giggling like any normal six year old.

“You’ve been watching over us,” Lourdes says, realizes it almost as she’s saying it, swinging around to where Dai’s watching her watch them, leaning back against the church front, arms crossed across his chest.

He shrugs.

But Dai was always terribly humble.

Lourdes turns back.

“But Jamil’s not really here,” she says, softly, “is he? Or Karen? Uncle Scott? Aunt Kate?”

No one dead, but alive, but us, she means.

He chuckles, a little quiet. A little sad.

“We never could let go, Lourdes.”

“Of life?”

She can’t see it, but she knows he’s shaking his head, and Lourdes knows why.

“Of caring.”

And as a gentle breeze picks up, drifting through her hair like invisible fingers, Lourdes looks at Lexi and burns the image of that Lexi, _her_ Lexi, into her mind.

It’s not okay. But this is. Maybe. A little.

Lourdes can be content, she thinks, as Dai joins her side, as they both watch the people who’ve stolen their hearts, who’ve integrated them so tightly woven into their lives, that they just can’t let go.

Even in death.

She can be content. Dual sentinels. Till the day they don’t need them anymore.


End file.
